Police Can Acquire Users’ iMessage Contacts; Chats Remain Private Though

With the controversy surrounding the privacy issues related to modern messaging services, it’s only natural that users would want to know if the chat app they are using is compromising private information. With regards to Apple’s iMessage, the company is assuring users that their conversations are not being tracked and stored. Contact numbers, however, are a different matter.

According to documents that The Intercept acquired, any number that users send messages to will be saved on Apple’s servers. This will then make them available to police enforcers or government agencies if they should decide to get them from the company via court order.

Anytime users input phone numbers when trying to send a text message, the app tries to decide if the message would go through the SMS system or Apple’s servers. The reason for this is to check whether or not the phone number is registered with the iMessage system.

In addition to the actual phone number of the users’ contacts, Apple also records when the messages were sent and even stores user IP addresses. This is a direct contradiction to what Apple assured customers in 2013, where they said that the locations of customers are never recorded.

Now, it should be noted that Apple has never claimed that it doesn’t store any customer information. The company simply said that it stored very little information on users, Recode notes. More than that, the process of pinging messages and numbers makes sense since it’s how Apple knows which message is sent to where.

However, what does cause concern is the fact that Apple stores user information for up to 30 days. In terms of the impact of this revelation, however, it simply means that the company knows that a user sent a message to a certain number on a specific date.